New Poems, and Variant Readings
1918
These are the poems Robert Louis Stevenson never intended for publication: intimate, unguarded verses that leaked into the world four years after his death in 1894. Gathered here are love poems of startling sincerity, nature lyrics suffused with melancholy, and quiet meditations on loss and longing that reveal the emotional bedrock beneath the adventure stories that made him famous. The title "Variant Readings" is key, these aren't just finished poems but glimpses of Stevenson's workshop, different versions of the same breath, showing how a master of narrative polished his more private work. Lloyd Osbourne's preface hints at the collection's strange power: "the sincerity of the love poems is unique," he writes, and one feels it in verses that trade Treasure Island's swashbuckling for something far more fragile. For readers who know Stevenson only as the author of Jekyll and Hyde, these pages offer a different man entirely, a poet wrestling with mortality, beauty, and the persistent ache of being alive.
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“All the things that are lovely”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“APPREHENSION AND all hours long, the town Roars like a beast in a caveThat is wounded thereAnd like to drown; While days rush, wave after waveOn its lair.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Letter from Town: The Almond Tree"You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget? White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge? Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledge Of our early love that hardly has opened yet. Here there’s an almond tree”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
